


Before the Fall

by Ewok_Poet



Series: Anjie Mencuri stories [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Debauchery, Drug Abuse, Gen, Musicians, Show Business
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-07-12 08:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7093540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ewok_Poet/pseuds/Ewok_Poet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An older and wiser Anjie Mencuri is telling the story of his wasted youth to a loved one.  Anjie previously debuted in Radiophonic Heart as an 18-year-old and he is frequently referenced in my diary, Letters Never Sent, where he is still a child. In this story, he could be anywhere between 30 and 50.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before the Fall

I was twenty. I will let no one say it is the best time of life. Not in a life where one grows up in public. Not in a life where billions of prying eyes are waiting for you to fail, because they know you eventually will. And for some strange reason, they will enjoy it. They will find it easier to prey on you when you-you’re weaker, as what they ultimately care about is not your well-being, but their own entitlement.

They say that they love you, they say that you are their life and then they end up loving to hate you, because you are not meeting their expectations. If you do snap out of it and end up finding yourself, you will anger them even further: for you’re no longer what they thought you should have been. They don’t like the idea of your growing up, they expect you to be the same person they once saw on the HoloNet. They expect you to be available to them all day, every day. They will prey on your mind like a whole band of Inquisitors, a whole coven of w-witches...no, wait, witches are actually great. I always wanted to be a man-witch.

And then, there is the business equivalent of this. They give you an illusion of control. And you play it safe, or you play with that illusion. You feed it. You end up making love to it, in a way you believe is as sincere as making love to your lifemate. I feel like my eagerness to keep the illusion alive still surpasses everything I have ever done to give you pleasure.

I was too young to know about playing it safe, so I chose to play. Not that I could have done otherwise. A team of self-appointed experts had already decided it all for me. I did not look good in white because I was too pale. I should have shown more of my face because I still had the alleged younglinghood innocence. My teeth were too big, so I was expected to smile with my mouth closed. I needed to exercise more in order to look like the other three when we all disrobe for the oven mitt act. If I was ever to grow significant chest hair, the only option was the epilaser, because it would distract the potential female fans from my pecs.

And when somebody calls you attractive that many times, you’re going to think you own half of the women in Coronet City, even though you don’t get to choose – they get to choose you. There was the option of somebody else choosing a partner for me in order to improve my public image, a romdram actress or a fellow musician, but luckily, I broke down before such a thing happened.

It didn’t cross my mind that everybody who ever saw me owned me and that I was, in some way, not a free person. Because I was twenty, as I said a couple of minutes ago!

You see, umm, I was pretty sure I was a grown-up. Twenty! Some people were senators at that age, some were Jedi Knights, some were romdram stars...and I was a quetarra hotshot in a...sorry, I said Jedi Knights and there were none at that point. I’m glad you’re not a journalist. So, umm, grown-up. I had a home of my own, I even got a speeder and tried to drive it. The experience resulted in my getting stuck on top of a tree and I just never tried again.

The thing that made me believe I was a person and not a hologram was that nobody compared me to SWS’s original quetarra player, Ros Correl, anymore. Perhaps it was because I no longer looked like him, nor I was attempting to. The fame brings a certain dose of ego along, whether the famous would admit that or not.

That was the time we met our current producer, Shaban Sapphyra. You are yet to meet him at the release party for Coroway, but beware – he may think you’re the next Galactic something. Whatever. He was to work with us on SexySpiceStarSinners. That name seemed like a good idea back then, you know?

We were watched twenty-five hours per day during the process of the holoalbum’s creation. We were supposed to become the album and the album was supposed to become us. Shaban wanted it finished as soon as possible, I enjoyed the process of creating it, the discovery of every single little tone, every single chord progression. I would lock myself in the refresher and come up with the strangest of riffs. And Wompy and Dale found themselves following my unorthodox practice, not knowing that was the only remaining trace of the actual Anjie Mencuri. They loved it. This is the process they attempted to use with Sassvar Graba, the Zabrak, but it did not work out.

But Antonio, he was not keen on giving me compliments. He would call me Sprout in presence of every single executive, holographer and mistress.

The mistresses were a whole different matter. It was Antonio’s idea. And he needed a new partner in crime. Somebody to swap women with. Somebody to try all spices in the Galaxy with. With Dale and Wompy already married and – as he once said while half-asleep – not attractive enough, he resorted to me.

And I played along. I am not sure with how many women we slept with. Some of them may have not been humanoid. I watched Clawdite pornography with him. Lots of it. I came up with the most vulgar of the comments on that atrocity. This is not to say that I have ever been an Angel from the moons of Iego, but I do have taste. There are things that nobody should be watching in order to appeal to the masses.

To this day, I’m sure that Antonio actually liked it, but you’re not going to tell that to anybody, right? In fact, please don’t. I truly believe that he has changed and that there is still a man underneath his mask.

Once we were done and travelling the Core Worlds to sell our work and our souls, I created the shallow impression of an insatiable quetarra hero, who looked like an Angel and played like Darth Vader would have had he been blessed with music talent.

In reality, that was nothing more than a hologram. A sensory perception of somebody that never existed. The one who was really me was slowly growing inside of the skull of the product created by the Empire-era media and that cursed desire to be liked.

The man was a mask, the mask was a man and he was on a constant decline. I am not ready yet to tell you how low I had fallen. Maybe because I never really renounced those days and I’m proud of everything I have gone through. And that would be hard to understand to somebody who never found solace in rokna blue.

Is this surprising? I am not saying that anybody should do rokna blue. As a matter of a fact, it’s a horrible thing. But I am glad that it was a part of my life. I am glad that it almost killed me, because I am finally the man I should have been all along.

But there are still demons in me. Destructive little droids preying on my insides, waiting for the moment when I’ll be jaded enough to harm myself somehow, the moment when I will fall into the void below. And they work together with their organic equivalents – the lovers of Steamy Wasaka Stew.

Once that happens, and I know it will, I would not want to take you down with me.

Then again, you’re not like me, by all means.

You are too good for me.

For your mask is only a replica of your actual face.

**Author's Note:**

> Epilaser - A more efficient epilator. Fanon.  
> Rokna blue is an extemely potent spice extracted from a poisonous tree fungus found on Endor


End file.
